May 26, 2012

The Prickly Dish

That last massive lie is at the core of Romney's political strategy. By removing that context (which is like talking about the sinking of the Titanic without mentionng the iceberg), Romney is knowingly arguing that the spending and debt levels of the last three years were some kind of choice by a president who just loves to strangle the US economy by spending much more money than we have. But the only president who made that choice was George W. Bush - by crippling revenues, even as he fought wars with no budgets and new entitlements with no end (Medicare D), rendering us bankrupt even as we desperately needed a rainy day surplus to fight the depression.

Obama did not have a serious choice; he had a fate. That fate was to pick up the pieces of the most catastrophic presidency in modern times. The final bouquet - after emptying the public coffers with no serious boost to employment, profits or growth - was the financial collapse, which both shrunk the economy, decimated revenues to 50 year lows, and automatically increased spending for the unemployed and poor in desperate need of help. Once you account for that - and the Nutting graph indeed shows that this was baked in the cake by the time Obama was elected - Obama has been, like most modern Democrats, far more fiscally conservative than any modern Republican.

Roundup, and roundup, and roundup,creeps in this online place from day to dayTo the last syllable of acceptance speech —and all our arguments have lighted trollsthe way to dusty death. Out, out, brief battery!Puppies are but loud and shallow, poor players,that strut and yap their hour upon the pageand then are heard no more. It is a slatechosen by an idiot, full of sound and fury,signifying nothing.

Turning and turning in the widening blogThe puppy cannot hear the puppeteer;Things fall apart; the Hugos cannot hold;Mere doggerel is loosed upon the fans,The canine tide is loosed, and in SpokaneThe ceremony of awards is drowned;The fest lacks all conviction, while the trollsAre full of passionate intensity.Surely some aggravation is at hand;Surely the Slated Hugos are at hand.The Slated Hugos! Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image of a nominee storyTroubles my sight: a waste of desert prose;A text with turgid body and an end wholly bland,A phrase blank and meaningless about guns,Is moving its dull verbs, while all about itWind shadows of the indignant reviewers’ words.The darkness drops again but now I knowThat sixteen nominees in fiction slotsWere read like nightmares in my shaking Kindle,And what rough book, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Sasquan for its award?